Subtle Knives, Subtle Hearts
by i love alex
Summary: They remain sitting on the porch steps a couple minutes longer after she has sighed, sad with resignation, adjusting her eye line and her body to realign away from his.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This was started before the sire bond storyline came into play and before Damon and Elena were actually together on the show; there was a note here from me, asking you to trust me because of both the content of the story and how different the style is but now, after actually experiencing Damon and Elena and the show in general, I'm going to revise that note from asking you, to really, _really_ asking you. Trust me enough to keep reading through what might appear to be someone else's love story.

Following on from where 4x06 left off however episodes that follow are not included (in other words, the sire bond doesn't exist).

Enjoy:

* * *

The question of love never seems to leave his mind even though he already knows the answer; he has long, long known the answer.

"_I can't do this, Elena. Not anymore."_

They remain sitting on the porch steps a couple minutes longer after she has sighed, sad with resignation, adjusting her eye line and her body to realign away from his.

There's a breeze that blows, the trees, the foliage surrounding them and suddenly she feels quite cold. He would be leaving soon; she wonders maybe, if she could run away and hide before he moved for the chance.

But he does something different entirely.

He stands, he hovers and he kisses the very surface of her head, almost as if he weren't kissing her at all.

She blinks. He's gone.

It's all she can do not to lean right over, falling against a stomach that doesn't brim with regret but a madness of change.

* * *

He'll go to the place he used to with Lexi.

It's a shack deep in the heart of Alaska. They'd retreat there, or rather Lexi would drag him, whenever the beginning of yet another detox was going particularly poorly. It gave him a chance to breathe, as she would say, without all the bullshit. It was a sorry excuse for any kind of living but the shack had four walls, a roof and a fireplace and that was all they seemed to really need.

Since her death and the years that have past since being there with her, it wouldn't have the same steadfast affect of calm and if he were honest, the place had no real significance without her. It was far though, and it meant he could be lost and those were two things he most wanted to be. And he could think of Lexi and her memory always seemed to have a steadfast affect of calm anyway.

He needed to be calm, to be brave. Weak as he felt, his back, his neck, the bones in his face. All weak and tired, from the year. From the days that slaughtered his mind and from the lives he had slaughtered himself.

Lately, guilt, for him, was as easy a feeling to be stifled and choked by than the love he had for Elena.

_Elena_; he has never whispered his life around that name but impossibly so, his life continues to whisper its way around her anyway.

He packs hardly anything; a jacket, some clothes. His journal and a pen. And a photograph. He doesn't know how extended this trip will be but he wouldn't need much to maintain himself if time prolonged beyond his control; he hopes, almost giddily so, that it does. He wishes to forget time almost entirely. Almost selfishly.

"You're leaving."

His brother, catching him, Stefan's hand just shy of the front door, states this as an inevitable occurrence, not as a question and Stefan wonders for a brief second, if Damon had pictured it always coming to this.

"Let's not pretend like this isn't the best day of your life."

Damon only breathes out, quick and sharp, like it had been stuck somewhere deep in his body. His eyes flick between his brother's, gauging him through sight and not through sound. He had never been one for verbal openness, even when they were small boys. Stefan displayed his love of his older brother by showering him with compliments and affections. Damon only pushed against these things, his mother's death, the first woman to ever break his heart, creating a solid boundary against any other person that could potentially hurt him. His love for his brother, Damon knew was more dangerous expressed than it was hidden. Stefan grew to accept this and to learn that Damon not only used it as a weapon but also as a shield.

Damon sways, infinitely finitely forward; _don't go._

Stefan looks to the floor so as not to look at his brother.

"I won't be reachable for the first week, call me if you need to after that."

He can't afford anything further and starts once again for the door, listening to the way Damon finally swallows down the drink in his throat; the lump there is solid though Stefan cannot hear that.

"I'll find you, you know."

The desperation and the plea are both invisible to the naked ear; Stefan hears it like loud bells are chiming.

"Goodbye, brother."

When Damon calls out again, the plea is as plain as day and Stefan breaks against it, grateful that he chose not to look back at his brother when leaving this time around. Not only learning the way his brother hid but that what was left behind when Damon couldn't was almost worse.

"Elena will find you too."

Stefan begins at a run, so fast that the world, the ground and the space behind his back blur into one backward and impossible notion.

* * *

It doesn't happen instantaneously; it happens when she walks into the room.

There's music playing, a piece by Beethoven that had been Damon's favorite when he was a boy. It's obvious in its melancholy and it echoes around the house in a way that makes him feel, for some reason, far less lonely.

"Moonlight Sonata." She says in observation and he keeps his eyes closed and nods. There's a tone in her voice that makes him feel exposed and for the first time in a long while he wants nothing more than to be far away from her.

Elena takes a detailed account of what she sees; his glass, the gauntness in his face, the way his sadness seems to mirror what she feels might just be her own. She watches the way he waits for her to say something, anything, and the way he tenses, minutely so, when she doesn't.

He wants to ask her what she wants, just to get this over and done with and then the slow burn of realization hits him, that what she wants is him.

He's fast and comes up against her, startling her in a way that would have startled human-Elena; the memory of it makes him smile and he's drunk with sorrow and with rum. He had been thinking of his brother and his old friend when she had interrupted the air with stolen ideas and stolen glances.

Their own music, it seems.

His hands find her waist even though he hadn't looked to put them there and then they're swaying, quietly, without intent.

"What are we doing?" He asks her because he needs answers to the questions that have been making shapes across his mind for the better half of knowing her.

He feels her hips over the material of her dress, the bump of them, the curve and the way they feel just to touch.

Elena flicks her eyes over his face, wondering whether she were close to sinking against him or flying far far back the other way. He puts his hand to the small of her back, preventing her from doing either.

"Kiss me." She whispers and her eyes are dangerous things he knows he could get so lost in, there'd been no depth.

They kiss and their chests seem equal in their breathlessness. They kiss and her heart is heavy. They kiss and she can't stop picturing Stefan. They kiss and her hips are suddenly rough, nothing to be memorized because they don't fully belong to him but they're there beneath his palms anyway.

Their sex is messy and painted with sighs and moans, claws at backs, naked hips and naked bones. There's freedom in their sex but chains that follow. There are her hips that don't belong to him but dig against his naked skin anyway.

You don't belong to me, and you never will, he thinks of telling her.

And her lips, her body, all in one are against him telling him otherwise.

"I'm undone." He hears her whispers out to no one but him when they're finished and she's staring up at the ceiling, her arms spread as if she were waiting to take flight and he thinks at that moment, their pants at a low, their naked bodies shed and their pulses high, that she had heard him all along.

* * *

For three days all he does is write. Entry after entry. Some words are poured out only to be drained and repeated. Some words he reads back over and wills himself not to scratch out. He writes because it's simpler to sort things out this way, by pen and through paper. To sort out his heart and his mind and to figure out where things might end and where things could begin.

On the fourth day, the entries are laid to rest. He's been cooped up and he needs air so he shuts his journal and shoves his boots back on, stepping out into the daylight.

Though the entries seem to follow him.

Damon and Elena follow him through thick snow and trembling water that sucks at his feet. When he dunks his head under to be washed clean; he sees them. He sees their faces and hears their voices and cannot be shed of light nor darkness.

He won't figure out which one is which because that would be defining an end he does not wish to take place. This thing between his brother and his lover, whatever it was between them, was not to be finite.

Even though it's what he had been writing for days on end.

_This is their story; he reads back to himself, this is their story, and not mine._

* * *

The more he sleeps with her, the more she unravels him; he's losing a carefully carved skin and it's a very fine line he's walking between wanting to lose it for her entirely and becoming desperate at the mere thought of its disappearance.

Damon has coined a perfect act for centuries now; push and push and push. Pretend, pretend pretend. And then.

Retreat.

He's lashed out and attempted to destroy his brother in many ways, sometimes seemingly without intending to, other times only purpose and hatred controlled his actions but this, this action, the strokes he makes with his hand across Elena's bare back, seem unsalvageable.

It felt like an affair, this sex that was without love but had love filling in the cracks; Elena loved him, he's realized.

Not though, how she had loved Stefan.

He doesn't want it to end, worshipping her skin and her moans. Wanting to bottle them, the proximity of her body making him insane but he knew, he knows, it will.

It's imperative though, that she does not.

* * *

On the nights she finds herself feeling the loneliest, she'll lie across his bed.

So long ago, when he had been missing, somewhere with Klaus, she wouldn't let herself be this indulgent. She wouldn't ever let herself stop and sink across a bed that still held traces of him. Engulf herself in the sheets and think, for just a second, of how it felt to have him between them. She wouldn't let herself do these things because the after affect, she knew, might've been catastrophic.

Elena rolls her head and stuffs her face so far against a pillow she would be suffocating herself if she were still alive.

His pillows smell like him, his records smell like him.

She, though it has taken her far, far too long to realize or notice, smells like him.

She wouldn't let herself linger in those things, his smell and his bed before. Now, though, it's the bareness of what she has left.

* * *

The first and only person to ring him on the cell phone he had begrudgingly brought with him is Caroline.

It's been 3 months to the day.

It makes a harsh buzz, coming from the bottom of his bag and when he digs it out, Caroline's name flashing on the screen, Lexi is vividly present across his mind; a gentle push.

"You done with your little 'In The Wild 'experiment yet, Emilie Hirsch wanna be?"

Though he had hated both the film and the novel, the association makes him smile, just the smallest amount. It's been 3 months and he's missed what it felt like to smile.

He's also missed, surprisingly so, Caroline's voice.

"Caroline." He answers, keeping the smile. He rearranges his body across the little dingy cot he's been using as a makeshift bed.

A sound that resembles to him what he thinks is a shocked squeak comes through the line; like she expected to have to work a little harder before he gave in and it's a long couple of seconds before she speaks.

"How are you?" She asks seriously.

He hadn't wanted this conversation to take place at all but finds that he doesn't want to be anything but completely honest with her now that it had begun. He thinks he owes her honesty, if nothing else. He had never really thought of leaving Caroline behind as something to grieve or feel guilt over, but suddenly, he does. They were friends, he knows and wishes he would've a long time prior.

"You don't have to worry, Caroline. I'm okay. I'm eating, keeping my regular animal diet. The weather wasn't too hard in the winter, not that it makes a difference. I'm…I'm well."

She hums in approval though there's something else he knows she won't hide for long and sure enough, her sigh comes, long and heavy.

"You don't have to do this to yourself you know."

Stefan can hear, though distant, the beginning shift of a season. The snow that had been endless for the past month was finally easing and the animals that had either travelled south or below ground were already starting to reappear and wake.

He can't tell if he's comfortable with staying because it was easier or if he's comfortable staying, hidden away and sheltered by only seasons.

Caroline speaks again though, "Stefan, please…I miss you."

He can't stop it because it comes too quickly to prevent but he covers the mouth piece, clenching his face, so that she doesn't hear it. He takes what feels like far too long but is probably only two, three minutes.

The warm tears settle on his cheeks and he breathes out, the oxygen a rush. He gulps and swallows and she's effortlessly patient all the while for him.

"Okay."

She takes a second. "Okay?"

He would miss Alaska.

"Okay."

He misses home more.

Caroline exhales, keeping both her relief and exuberance subtle for his benefit. They quickly share goodbyes and he hangs up, moving about the shack to pack his things, stuffing lone shirts and a pair of jeans back into his bag.

When he's got it slung over his back, standing in the centre of the room, he reaches a hand down into his pocket.

He hadn't need to bring it, able to bring her face into his mind as clear as lightning, but the photograph someone had taken of them together at his first and last football game at the high school is folded neatly inside the pocket of his jeans. He hasn't looked at it once while being here but reached his hand in, clasping it, rubbing the thinness of the gloss between two fingers whenever he needed to. He reaches now, careful because his hand is shaking, not to crumple the photograph altogether.

He's grateful, understanding why because she so understood him, that Caroline made no mention of either Elena or his brother as reasons to bring him home.

Grateful that she knew even though he hadn't told anyone, that those two things were no longer reasons for keeping him away or for making him come back either.

* * *

Like a fire that lacked enough lumber, they burned out. Quietly and without the dramatics that had, in some form, brought them together.

"How long until the inevitable happens and he comes racing back you think?" It's said, she knows, as a dig to his brother but she can hear the underlining vulnerability there. A vulnerability that has never faded; Damon perhaps, missed his brother, in ways she didn't have the capacity to.

They were brothers first and foremost, she's learnt though failed, at first, to understand.

"Soon." She says and can't bring herself to get up from where she had been sitting, folded on the couch in her family's living room. She felt clotted, like moving would betray her senses and she would stumble so much at the littlest of steps.

"I think he'll come back to you soon."

It's a sentiment to him and to their relationship that Damon at her words makes no sign to oppose their truth.

He had been tired and restless for days, knowing it had to happen soon. That Stefan at the news of Elena and Damon's separation, would finally come back to claim his rightful place.

As the good brother. As the honourable brother. As the brother he had grown up with, was bound by invisible cords that he wanted never to break with; he stops pacing, glances over in the direction of the door and then back to where she was on the couch, looking as though she were waiting for it to swallow her whole. He wants to leave though also doesn't; he straddles for a moment, between the two.

"Did we send him away, you think?" She suddenly asks, her eyes shadowed as she looked out across the room, focusing on nothing but the inside of her mind.

He will love her, perhaps for the rest of his life and they will dance to their own music and they won't sway as close, knowing where they each stood but she'd be there, he'd be there, standing and waiting for the other to appear when necessary.

"Would you have stayed?" He asks her. The question was there before he had even the chance to answer it himself; he looks for her face, watching as she turned, coming out of a resolve that he had never been allowed to enter. A resolve he knew, would only belong to Elena and his brother.

"Even if I had known the ending?" She takes a moment, smiles though it's pressed against other features demanding blunter reactions, "Maybe, maybe not. I would like to think that I would've done what I thought was necessary."

He moves for the door, readying himself for a separation between them that will last as long as the time he will love her.

A necessary act.

"Goodbye, Elena."

Elena closes her eyes; she's waiting. She's not sure what for, but she's waiting.

"Goodbye, Damon."


	2. Chapter 2

He doesn't remember anything about the letter he had written to Lexi, telling her for the first time of Elena, far too drunk and overcome by his new love but he remembers and will read over from time to time, the letter Lexi had written in return.

It was just one word.

_Finally._

* * *

Damon is standing and has positioned himself almost in the exact same fashion to how Stefan had left him. The shot glass he's cradling in his hand though, is full and hasn't been touched and the expression that Stefan hadn't been brave enough to witness when leaving him, stares him full in the face.

"Hello brother."

For decades, the only want on his mind had been for his brother. He knows now, that the want had not only been there because their relationship was strained and weightless but because they were simply brothers and the need for him was as normal as the need for replenished air.

Damon raises his shot glass in greeting but brings it down onto the nearest counter rather than to his lips. He walks to where Stefan is still standing, his backpack in one hand and takes it from him without a word.

Damon, usually hating gestures, wrestling against them, had just made perhaps the biggest.

"Welcome home."

The word to Stefan, sounds like a sure, solid gift.

* * *

Out of habit, and a hopeful attempt to quieten the anxiety that had been coursing through him since setting foot back into his home, Stefan checks every single room. It was a ritual that had come out of completely nowhere but one he kept whenever returning, no matter how lengthy the trip.

The last room and the final room is his own. Everything is preserved, right down to the shirt that had slipped from the wardrobe in his rush to pack months ago. It's hanging, half out of the drawer and he walks to tuck it in, noticing as he did so, that the bed he had purposefully left unmade, was rumpled and thrown about in what looked like a immaculately organized mess.

He recognizes it. Something.

He leaves the shirt. Suddenly, he can't seem to find the base of his throat or make out the fine threading of his lungs, making his way to the bed and grazing just the tip of it with the tips of his fingers.

This bed had been lain in and dishevelled and then carefully changed back to the dishevelment he had left it in.

And unlike his journal entries, only one face and one voice and one life come flooding into his brain.

Like a ravenous man, he drinks.

He closes his eyes and lets himself breathe, remembering, almost as though for months he had forgotten, how to associate her as something unconnected to anything but him.

Not a possession to be had or kept, though here now on the earth as a vampire she were to be forever, she was merely in his sheets. She had come into this room, maybe once, maybe more and had climbed into the bed. She had messed up his sheets and after awhile, maybe if she had reached her limit or had received her full, she unrolled herself, making sure to place the covers back. The big, white sheet a thing she would wave and shake out, perfectly reassembling a map he had unknowingly left for her.

With a rush, he's almost choking, Stefan opens his eyes, his bedroom a vision before him.

Caroline had been on his mind as he walked and traced through the walls and the rooms of this house.

He thinks before he does anything, he'll see her.

Though it takes him many minutes to unclasp the hand that had tugged on the sheet to begin with.

* * *

He expects to cry but is glad, as he embraces her, her arms finding a sure grip around his shoulders, that he doesn't.

The tears lose themselves against his chest, an ache forming but she holds him a little closer and they disintegrate of their own accord. The bravery he had hoped to cloak himself with in such a thick fashion that the ability to reach him through it was impossible, was in this hold, he knew. He had it alone but it was, so surely, in this hold.

"Just so you know, I'm still pissed."

He lightly laughs, the both of them parting. Caroline steps back, openly studying him; he's not sure what she's looking for but she doesn't seem to be able to find it, leaving her study to rest her eyes only on his face.

With an elbow, she bumps him gently, "You okay? Really?"

If the question had been posed to him month's prior, the answer probably would've been obvious. He was broken hearted and lonely of course he wasn't okay. But months have passed and he's not lonely.

Though perhaps, still, broken hearted.

Elena shouldn't be on the surface of this question but she is, as he thinks without meaning to, standing there in the hallway of Caroline's house, of her body in his bed.

"Yes…yes I'm okay."

The thought, though he tries to shake it, ducking his head, only grows in its clarity.

"Will you forgive her?"

He's suddenly flustered, his head snapping back up and he stares at her with a sense of bewilderment; he shouldn't be surprised, that Elena would have been so obvious upon him but the question displays itself across his mind in a way the previous one hadn't.

"Do I go back to her, knowing the past and forgetting it because I love her? Or because I'm too weak to do anything else?"

It's the one thought that hadn't made its way out off his head and on to paper, perhaps too stuck. Perhaps strangled to keep hidden.

Caroline reaches for the door handle, pulls it open and makes it so that the space between their bodies was thin; she takes his hand and in her grasp, it stops trembling.

"You came back here because I asked you to, not because she did even though she wanted to. You just had to let each other go knowing the truth, knowing you were only going to come back to what a weakness cannot break or destroy."

He needs to ask what, he needs to in order to get through the door and onto the street and to Elena but it's crammed into his ears and against the very fineness of his skin that the reality of those months and that time are suddenly behind him and not before him.

"Go." He hears and the doors open and the sky is outside, he's outside. The warmth from Caroline's hand still with him.

"I'll see you soon."

And this assurance beats any.

* * *

He climbs the stairs, walks around the banister and enters her bedroom all in one fluid and thoughtless motion. Never stopping for guesses or air; he was here and she was there. He had followed the route to her blindly, knowing her blindness came in return; without her, without him, they were senseless.

He calls her name, barely above a whisper and she comes like he had chorused it.

He's holding her and she's wrapping her arms tight around his neck, cocooning herself to his body; this reunion was neither bittersweet nor romantic it simply was. He had returned and she had waited.

"Are you hurt?" She finds herself asking; they were standing just against the tip of her bed and she has untied her arms from around his neck in order to press her face against it instead, kissing him, inhaling, reviving herself.

The irony of the word goes beyond the both of them and he shakes his head, holding her still.

He had written word after word, sentence after sentence of what had seemed like their ending but what really, had only been their in-between.

For some reason, the idea of eternity with her is suddenly prosperous and beautiful in its daunting reality, laid out perfectly before them.

She's whispering I love you and he's listening to it with all his might, letting it settle against his skin and settle against memories and times and months and days.

He's thinking, this shouldn't be so easy but he's also thinking, I have loved you in return.

* * *

A/N: So. I'm feeling pretty hypocritical right about now. I've been going on and on about it on tumblr, that I'm fully on board with the 'change' of Stelena because it's necessary in order for them to have a stronger foundation and them I'm here, ending this story with this bullshit. Ha. But really, their 'reunion' section all came out without me even coming up for air and I feel that their discussion that would've followed this and their growing foundation following this, is (hopefully) laced in some way in the words above anyway.

I hope.


End file.
